Maureen Corrigan
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2019, Corrigan was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle.
Corrigan served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures was published by Little, Brown in September 2014. Corrigan is represented by Trinity Ray at The Tuesday Lecture Agency: trinity@tuesdayagency.com
Corrigan's literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading! was published in 2005. Corrigan is also a reviewer and columnist for The Washington Post's Book World. In addition to serving on the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, she has chaired the Mystery and Suspense judges' panel of the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize.
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More than a decade after his debut, We the Animals, Justin Torres returns with a novel that centers on a deathbed conversation between two friends about the distortions and erasures of queer history. -
Set in the near future, C Pam Zhang's atmospheric novel centers on a chef who takes a job at a tech entrepreneur's isolated compound after smog kills most of Earth's plant and animal species. -
An impoverished servant girl escapes the fledgling Jamestown colony during the winter of 1609–1610 in a historical saga that takes its inspiration from Robinson Crusoe. -
An acclaimed Irish poet deserts his sick wife and two young daughters. Anne Enright's new novel centers on the way that betrayal reverberates throughout the next generations. -
Set in a neighborhood where Blacks and immigrant Jews have lived next to each other for decades, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels critic Maureen Corrigan has read this year. -
Maureen Corrigan recalls playing with the iconic doll on the sidewalk in Queens in the 1960s. She says Barbie didn't teach girls to be of service; she taught the giddy pleasures of a seeming autonomy. -
Lindsay Lynch's luscious debut, Do Tell, is set in Hollywood's Golden Age. Dwyer Murphy's The Stolen Coast is a moody tale of a lawyer who makes his money ferrying people on the run into new lives. -
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull grew up in the rural interior of Central Florida during the 1960s and '70s. Her memoir evokes a land of perfect citrus, and the cruel costs of its harvest. -
Ford brings his Frank Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, while Moore weaves together a fragmentary Civil War plot with an off-kilter vision of the afterlife in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. -
Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is a sexually-explicit, cynical novel about young people striving. Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, grapples with injury, addiction, masculinity and loneliness.
